This blog is about spiritual awakening, maps and stages, the blinding effects of our strong momentum/conditioning (karmic propensities), view, realization, experience, etc. If you're new here, I recommend going through the 'Must Reads' articles (see sidebar). For discussions you are welcome to join the Awakening to Reality Facebook group

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"To
carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That
myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening."
"To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to
forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad
things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as
the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization
remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly."
- Dogen
__
I absolutely adore this! Anyone knows any more gems from Dogen..?

John TanAnother quote from Dogen to balance and see the other side of emptiness.

“Birth
is just like riding in a boat. You raise the sails and you steer.
Although you maneuver the sail and the pole, the boat gives you a ride,
and without the boat you couldn’t ride.
But you ride in the boat, and your riding makes the boat what it is.
Investigate a moment such as this. At just such a moment, there is
nothing but the world of the boat. The sky, the water, and the shore are
all the boat’s world, which is not the same as a world that is not the
boat’s. Thus you make birth what it is; you make birth your birth. When
you ride in a boat, your body, mind, and environs together are the
undivided activity of the boat. The entire earth and the entire sky are
both the undivided activity of the boat. Thus birth is nothing but you;
you are nothing but birth.”

John TanIn
walking, there is no one walking. The hands swing and legs move; the
nose breathes, the heart beats and the path walks itself. The air, the
hands, the legs and the path all went beyond their designations into the
action of walking. No one and the mere action of walking, what is the
relationship?

Not at all. Dissociation implies a separation between an observer an observed. There is a sense of being distant, aloof, and dissociated from things being observed, as an observer behind.

What is being spoken here is the complete collapse of being an observer or watcher of any sort, as it is realised that in seeing there's only colors without a seer, in hearing always only sounds without a hearer. That sense of an observer or watcher is a complete illusion.

Then, after that collapse of that delusional 'self' agency/watcher/observer/doer, whatever sounds or colors aren't being experienced by a self from behind, rather they are experienced in and of itself, by itself. Sound hears, and colors see. They are all self-luminous and vivid without an experiencer. There is no more sense of distance, there's only radiant and spontaneous manifestation, gapless (no subject/object division) and agentless (no experiencer/doer/perceiver of any kind).